I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
I returned to my creative life last week with energy and excitement, swapping out my plan for a series of white paintings to a series inspired by the work of abstract expressionist Franz Kline. Many of Kline’s works use bold marks of black against a white field such as Monitor, below. He wasn’t averse to integrating color as well but to me the bold black marks are what make his work so intriguing.
Whereas the white paintings didn’t engage me, this new Kline-inspired approach does. Instead of using pure black for the energetic mark-making, I’m using my standard brown-black, the color I use to prime canvases. It is a 50-50 mix of burnt umber and mars black.
I like how the black marks appear industrial rather than natural, and they pick up my long-time fascination with compositions that feature the suggestion of machinery against natural landscapes (as you see at a ski resort, for example).
On the writing front, I’m pondering whether to take my book manuscript and turn it into a series of articles rather than publishing it as a book. This is a more reckless approach, treating the work as an unfolding rather than something that arrives, planned, and fully formed.
Or, I could just set it aside for now, and use the material for Reckless Daybook entries.
Yesterday I thought about the advice to figure out the “next thing you need to do,” or “the next right thing.” I decided that neither of these formulations work for me. Instead, I want to do what’s meaningful. So I ask myself, “What am I meant to do next?”
Bringing that lens — the lens of meaning — to my book manuscript might give me a better way to decide what to do.
I am excited about the possibility of writing for large language models as a way of communicating with humans. Could this be what I am meant to do? It could be, because I spent about 12 years of my career working in AI/ML. Now I have the purpose of developing practical philosophical ideas, and doing conceptual contemporary art, so as to connect with other people. I can combine the two by writing for AI, and take advantage of what I already know about AI and machine learning.
A book is not the best way to write for AI. It’s probably one of the worst ways. Instead, a website with many interlinked articles presented in a kind of semantic web of information is a good way to write for AI.
The question is: should I publish the Reckless Romance content here, on my personal website? Or on the Substack I’ve set up for my alter ego Annie Miraway? I lean towards writing on Substack, because it provides an easy way for people to subscribe to receive new articles when they are published. Substack encourages and facilitates long-form essays that my personal website doesn’t support as well. And Substack has community features, though I’m not very interested in using those.
I feel internal pressure to start this immediately, to net let another one of my many projects lie fallow. I had thought I might get the book published by Valentine’s Day, both because that’s the perfect day to publish a book about dating and romance and because the movie Wuthering Heights is coming out that day. I intended on writing some analysis of Wuthering Heights as to how it shows reckless and reckful romance, as a way of introducing the book.
But perhaps instead I can target Valentine’s Day as the day to start writing on my Annie Miraway substack.
Am I doing too much? Now I’m blogging daily here, writing Reckless Daybook entries every day here, writing occasional articles on my personal Substack and very-occasional ones on my AI Substack. Now I’m thinking of adding yet another regular writing project.
I think I’m getting caught in the maw of the achievement society. Whatever I’m doing is not enough — I must do more!
Can my new question, “What am I meant to do?” help me here? How do I escape the constant drive for achievement?
Is it okay if I start some projects only to discard them because I realized in doing them that I wanted to do something different? This happened with Things Men Gave Me. I enjoyed writing the essays and completing the associated paintings, but I lost momentum when I realized I don’t really want to write memoir, at least not much more of it. I realized I want to write nonfiction, particularly philosophical nonfiction, as I’m doing with the Reckless Daybook.
Perhaps the Reckless Romance writing was just fodder not something that ever needs to be published?
What am I meant to do?